


you do what you have to do

by millimallow



Series: the world of owa [9]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Original Work
Genre: Fantasy, Urban Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-20 02:04:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17613356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/millimallow/pseuds/millimallow
Summary: part 10 of the world of owa anthology. takes place in the ruined underground city of ta arune.i'm just a messenger boy, i fetch other people's toys.





	you do what you have to do

i didn’t know this job would take so long. news of ta arune collapsing shocked everyone, sure, but i don’t think we realized its full implications. not until now. now, trapped under the earth for a good month now, alone except for me and my teammates. not because i was in ta arune- i was in the heath brisinger lowlands at the time the news came, putting me barely in the proximity- but because i’m here in the aftermath.

this is a world of magic- a world of wizards and enchantment, tears in the weave and animals that fly regardless of any natural impulse to deny it of them. in school we discussed information rips, and the idea that there are places out there far from our world that don’t have what we do. but even here, some people do boring jobs. i do boring jobs. i have some preliminary training as a fighter, but in the end? i can’t look someone in the face in combat, and i go down. so i’m a freelance removals guy.

things have been floating around for a while now. ideas of closing the hole, leaving the rest to become gradually incorporated into the earth. not because it’s a good idea, but because everyone is at the end of their rope with trying to clean up this mess. i can sympathize. the money is good, but there’s money elsewhere. and i’ve seen some bad shit before, but this is truly abysmal.

we’re lucky in that there isn’t much heavy construction material around. pretty much everything is some kind of brick or artificial wall, especially in the poorer areas. many of the smaller homes simply collapsed in on themselves when the water came and the ground began to shake with the force. our bad luck is mostly in… well, it’s in the mold. everywhere, that shit is. an entire city of cheap garbage and untreated wood is a paradise for these things. nothing can be done about it, so me and the team just wear face masks. now we’ve been down here for a while, we’ve had a few illnesses, so they’ve switched us to full gas masks and instructed us to sleep with air filters on. moving and checking things isn’t easy with surgical gloves, and we all sound like we’re talking through water whenever we try and communicate during the day.

it’s probably obvious that this isn’t a good idea by now. anyone down here who wasn’t sent here after the incident is dead. good-will charities and mysterious agencies around the world all piping up to send their people over here for evacuation assistance. i don’t envy that job. lots of people died, all we do is dig up the occasional corpse from the rubble. and there’s no burial procedure for these bodies- i didn’t train in a mortuary- so we leave them as long as they don’t get in the way. raiders and overenthusiastic rogues took all the valuables they could get their hands on as soon as the guard over the entrance hole was removed. so- why are we here?

“they said it could be anywhere in the city, right?”

i turn to face the muffled voice. it’s camoro, one of my teammates. tall red dragonborn, our de-facto deputy leader. she’s pressing her feet lightly against the ground, trying to judge the sound. it could be hollow underneath, from the looks of it, and we all know we can’t pass any potential up. another member of the team pipes up from investigating a pile of rubble.

“yeah.” netri, a human like me. close to my age. likeable. “though they did advise us to avoid the outskirts if we could.

camoro turns to me. “marilus, do you still have that pickaxe and hammer with you?”

“yes. do you need them?” i’m not a conversationalist.

“i want to take a crack at this hollow here. could just be a basement, but who knows.” i hand the kit over to her and watch her crouch, as far behind the hole itself as she can manage. the force she inflicts is light at first, but gets heavier when the initial damage proves inefficient. a lack of compromise on the entrance is promising. we were instructed that it was high-security, even before the only two people who knew the exact location died in the grip of a stampede to get up the arkangel. hell, what we’re looking for is supposed to be located so deep in there that the guy who hired us didn’t rule out the use of dynamite on the entrance. but none of that matters if this isn’t the right place for us.

netri comes to stand next to me. he’s eating one of the bluish-brown sustenance bars that form part of the supplies we get dropped every so often by these guys. they taste like salty dirt, at least to me.  we watch camoro hack at it, refusing our help, for a good 3 minutes before we hear some disturbance. a creak, indicating a hinge somewhere being disturbed.

“we might be onto something.” camoro grunts, pulling herself to stand once more. i ask the question i’ve been wanting to ask for a while.

“dynamite?”

“usually i’d say no, but fuck it. that stuff’s been sitting there for long enough.” without a moment of hesitation i hand it over to camoro, who gestures for us to move back. so we do, kneeling behind a dilapidated slice of brick wall as camoro breathes fire onto the end of the single stick. in an instant, she breaks for it, leaving the stick on the ground. and there’s a few tense, glorious moments before it explodes and sprays debris everywhere, leaving me thankful for the mask. all three of us take the cue to approach the site once more. a crater has been ripped into the ground, unearthing a dark tunnel. reinforced with magic-resistance metal, an extreme scarcity in this now-destroyed underground world. deep and foreboding, its final destination unknown.

whatever some rich bastards wanted us to find so badly they’d go to this length for it- we’ll finally get to find that out. and i can’t promise myself i’ll feel good about it, but i know i’ll feel relief.


End file.
